David Ely

Morrison's DC

I have to hand it to DC Comics for having the guts to publish the comics they’ve been putting out lately. In a summer where parent company Warner Bros. released a widely successful Batman movie, one would have expected them to try to parlay that success by publishing some watered down, accessible Batman comics. Instead they give Grant Morrison the keys to the kingdom and let him put out stuff that’s as crazy as you could possibly expect. Why not? As he says, “the success of any superhero movie doesn’t affect the sales of the monthly comic one bit. We always sell more trades of stuff like The Killing Joke or Arkham Asylum but numbers on the monthly issues don’t really change when a film comes out.” So they let him run wild with the monthly, because few people who didn’t read comics before The Dark Knight came out are going to start, and this is what DC publishes:

Superman Beyond, a 3-D comic in which Superman and Nazi Superman from Earth-10 travel to comic book limbo (where forgotten characters go) in a multi-dimensional yellow submarine. In 3-D!

BatmanR.I.P., in which Bruce Wayne suffers a psychotic break, villains inject him with heroin, and he wanders the streets of Gotham hallucinating and then drops into a back-up persona that Bruce Wayne saw fit to invent just in case he was ever driven insane by a villain.

Final Crisis, where no one really knows what’s going on yet, but features a Japanese superhero named “Most Excellent Superbat” and a fight between Wonder Woman and an evil dominatrix Mary Marvel with pink hair.

In other words, crazy crazy stuff. Either you love it and you’re willing to pour into these fairly difficult books, or you think it’s stupid because you just like the ones where Radioactive Man punches things.